


Worst Feelings Jam Ever: Happen

by loveortoxicradiation



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-14
Updated: 2014-02-14
Packaged: 2018-01-12 03:41:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,179
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1181460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/loveortoxicradiation/pseuds/loveortoxicradiation
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Aranea watches you, impassive, but you begin to suspect this Mindfang is a predator in her own way, calculating how best to incapacitate your sharp bits and rip through your squishy belly for the delicious viscera.</i>
</p><p>After doomed!John dumps her, Vriska spends her afterlife with a plan to avoid the other trolls and collect all the loot. She fails at both. Aranea, fresh from the conversation with Terezi, finds her, to hear the other side of the story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Worst Feelings Jam Ever: Happen

Why does the afterlife have to be lousy with trolls? You couldn’t stand these wastes of grubsauce as a single unit in the Alpha Timeline, why would you ever want to meet every single permutation of fuckwad these assmongers could Become in the 612 hours you played Sgrub?

Not to speak of the dancestors. No. No, really. Let’s not speak of them.

You haven’t seen another human since doomed John. You never met their time player, but he sure must have had some basic competence in time powers!

Not being a robot might have influenced that.

Speaking of the blue-blooded metal chassis of bad decisions, you’ve seen disproportionately few of her. The cherry-red deity herself blipped across your path a few times. Every doomed you that you've asked has agreed that the Aradias must have put a moratorium on Vriskas or something.

Which, come on! The natural lifespan of Bluh Bluh, You Killed Me should have ended when she killed you back. You’re big enough to admit to a bit of bias here, but you’ve died twice now, which is more than even Aradia has. Where does she get off avoiding you?

The timelines where you died before she killed you don’t count. Actually, none of the others count! You don’t care if she avoids every doomed you forever, but dead or no, you’re alpha timeline. You’re important. Besides, hadn’t Aradia always loved dead people?

(Whatever. It’s not like you miss her or anything. What would the two of you even talk about, right?)

—

So there you are, in some Land in another thrice-damned dreambubble, there’s Mounds everywhere and these kickass giant skeleton basilisks that hiss and bumrush you, which is cute, as if they were anything but a memory of some pixels. You’ve nothing better to do in the afterlife than to continue the complete amazing lifeplan of looting. Nothing soothes the soul like sweet useless shit with too many blings, as any gamblignant would know!

You’re breezing through a burn-the-spiderweb, shoot the eyeball, open the door kind of dungeon, trying not to think about how this is the rest of your existence, when the gilded iguana-mouth Boss Door opens with much gnashing of brick and spraying of dust.

There’s a goddamn troll in the threshold.

It’s the Beforean Scorpio. You suppress the embarrassing heartmark-filled fangirly glee. She’s only the alternate teen version of Mindfang, self! She probably wasn’t ever a pirate, come on.

“Hey, Mindfang-of-the-past. How’s being an unfathomably old ghost treating you?” you say, flipping your hair. You continue the internal mantra of _not-impressive, fake version_ but end up crossing your arms, all the same.

“No worse than usual,” she says. The stupid wriggler inside you, traitor that she is, jumps in excitement. This is what she sounded like, that’s her! Alternaverse and so very many sweeps too young, but Mindfang, all the same. That’s what the book you read every night would have sounded like in person.

The worst part is, you know she knows what you’re feeling, so you know trying to hide the feelings from your expression is doubly pointless.

Not that your posturing would fool someone without stupid goddamn lousy psychic powers. Emotional control hasn’t ever really been 'your speed.'

Baby Mindfang chuckles. It’s much raspier than yours, a bit reminiscent of spidermom. Maybe she could pepper her sentences with shrieks to complete the picture. She scans the room, taking in the fifty thousand ugly scribblings by one hundred thousand slaving iguana consorts engraving into eternity such wisdom as _when’s lunch break?_ and the _nobles are jerks : <_, smiling, as if consorts weren’t MIND-NUMBINGLY STUPID; she crosses the threshold and the dreambubble shifts.

The two of you stand on a jagged emerald moss-covered mound, worn from the instantly generated ages, that overlooks the crux of the planet. You don’t see why this had to interrupt the removal of valuables from their homes into your sylladex. Maybe the dreambubble operating logic has a command to thwart your continued happiness.

“How has adventuring treated you? These planets are very interesting. It’s fascinating, how the iguana’s civilization grew along with the planet’s increasing concentration of Xenon gas. Their prophets would use the swirls in the crux for divination. It was during such a ceremony they discerned the late arrival of their would-be heroes, and re-dubbed them the Nobles. I’ve heard you aren’t much for lore,” she laughs, her hand over her mouth like a sparkly cateye-donning babe, as if the joke weren’t You Don’t Read, Lol, “but could we have a session sometime? I’ll give you some choice loot if you let me really get my exposition on. Not many have the patience for it.”

Your feet aren’t lead. In theory, sure, feet are never actually anything but feet.

(Barring prosthetic ones.)

In practice, at this moment, can you make them go anywhere? Apparently not! Stupid feet. Who needs them anyway?

“I go by Aranea, by the way. It’s nice to meet you.” She waves. You never noticed when you were the one wearing the obnoxious day-glo of Light godhood, but the plush orange practically strobes in migraine-inducing brightness.

“Aranea, huh? What class were you anyway? I heard from Nitram the hair-dyed that he was a Rogue,” you ask, adding commentary that you still had your doubts of Rufioh’s truthfulness, as if a Nitram in any part of paradox space could be a class that actually accomplished things.

(The robot horse leg-replacement must have been the important divergence! You wish you could have warned Equius.)

“I was a Sylph. To be honest, I was awful at it. None of us were very good at the game. My major contribution was uncovering the details of the Scratch.”

Judging by the pink moon, far above, and the lack of its green cousin, the abode of Vanilla Milkshake: Omniscient Asshole Extraordinaire, the new elements beginning to overshadow LOMAX compose a Beforean beach. It’s odd. The beach looks completely different than any Alternian beach you encountered (and you’ve encountered more than most.) Even the water looks off, somehow.

With all this baffled admiration of scenery, you notice a bit late that Aranea’s jumping in place, her face turning bright cerulean, likely from how tightly she’s biting her mouth shut. Her hands are flailing fists of excitement.

You’re two words into asking what her problem is when she bursts, chirping out an in-depth explanation of lunar cycles and gravity’s effects on tides. The difference comes entirely from the moon, you learn. At length. It’s eight times eight degrees of adorable. You almost don’t regret thinking loudly enough to catch her attention on the matter.

All the same, when she’s done you hold out your hand for the boonbucks, at which point Aranea blushes deeper, ruby-shoe’d foot scuffing against the sand in counterpoint to the yellow claws of her left hand scratching behind her ear.

“Ah—I’m sorry. I spent all my money recently. You know how it is, bribing people to listen to you while constantly nerding out. The porkhollow empties fast!”

It’s absolutely criminal. Worth no fewer than eighteen drubbings. Telling your dancestor as much reminds you of Terezi, which promptly removes the fun from teasing. Or talking. Or being within a thousand lawnrings of an empath.

Can you still use thief powers as a ghost? There has to be a lucky path that gets you away from this situation.  You try to pluck the strands of f8, but you never quite learned how to use your powers without railroading the alpha timeline to your whims; without a timeline, you have no bearing.

Naturally, Aranea uses the golden opportunity of your flipping out silence to exposit further.

“This is where I lived a sweep before the game.”

The change of subject comes as a relief. Still, you can’t help the _better watch your debts, Mindfang!_

“My lusus died. Culling orphans meant adopting them, in our culture. I moved here on a whim, having always wanted to sail. It didn’t hurt my best friend was the princess. The Empress’ coffers easily accommodated construction drones and an allowance. She was delighted. The friend…not so much.”

Aranea gesticulates aimlessly, focused on sifting through her memories, into the Eons. It doesn’t take flashy mind-probing powers for Vriska to judge the possible length of the rest of this encounter (for fucking ever.)

"Meenah acted out, often. The Empress, in haste to soothe her charge, played matchmaker. She sent us on candleit paledates disguised as diplomacy lessons. Literally candleit! Elaborate, and impressive, and basically the worst thing that could have happened. My existence become part of a long list of things the Empress forced unto her. We didn’t talk much after that, even in the game.”

You’re uncomfortable with this impromptu feelings jam. She looks haggard, suddenly. You wonder what planet-settings could have made this weenie a completely badass petticoat seagrift like Mindfang, in your world.

“She was killed, like you. I was the selfish wiggler who didn’t have the reelsolve to kill her. Since we died, she hasn’t left her Moon Palace memory. There aren’t even words for how long a time that means she’s been locked up, by herself, in that blasted moon I couldn’t stop her from ollying out to in the first place, back home on Beforeus. The Empress herself beseeched me to make Meenah see sense somehow. I never could! I’ve enjoyed watching your civilization and your session, and meeting you all, but more than anything I would like to have my best friend back.”

That’s it. The discomfort has ascended every ounce of its echeladder. The UH, HEAVY MUCH?-O-METRE is so absolutely sicknasty with EXP it’s shitting special moves.

Currently, you’re surviving the onslaught of rheumy, suddenly deflated dancestor by avoiding any possible eye contact. You want to comfort her but a complete inability to process things like an actual person is at least half the reason you’re in this abysmal situation in the first place, branches upon sub-branches of life-ruining emotional incompetence dating back to when you were the mature one, because the stick of comparison was Eridan, so much smaller in stature but with his off the charts entitlement sprung from the brooding caverns fully-formed. The only data you have comes from your failed moirailligence.

Taking cues from Past Kanaya couldn’t make the situation any worse, you suppose.

Feeling like a complete tool the entire time, you shuffle close enough to Aranea to place your hand on her shoulder—her frame’s filled out, unlike yours, but she’s not much taller—for a round of paps, while half-murmuring shoooooooosh for fear fully committing to the noise would constitute a come-on. Ultimately, it sounds like a bushel of squirrels colonized your lungs. Maybe they have. Your chest feels tight.

After paradox space’s least surreptitious tear-wipe,  Aranea laughs under her breath, and at your look of bewilderment explains, “Can you believe I have to say Moon Palace unironically? There was even a 50-ft gold statue of herself in the spiral staircase. If only you could see it.”

Without the crisis of EMOTIONS, OH NO, you have space to ponder upon sorta-you having A Thing with sorta-Feferi.

You always enjoyed when Peixes would show her fangs. If she’d done so more often, maybe she wouldn’t have been knocked down like a toy by the temper tantrum Eridan threw! As if she’d been his to take home when fighting with Sollux grew boring. How the same troll who called a city-sized murder machine of an eldritch abomination Mother, who had the strength and inherent viciousness of the highest of coldbloods, who survived sharing the same blood as Her Imperious Condescension when swarms of tyrians before her never made it out of grubhood could be such a complete pacifist loser had always baffled you, even back on Alternia.

And what did it get her, in the end? They lost the Ultimate Reward. There was no Alternian culture to restructure. She died. She was dead! Dead forever!!!

You….you have a lot of FEELINGS on this topic, okay? It doesn’t mean anything!!!!!

You give Aranea’s shoulder one last pap. “Those are the 8reaks,” you say, on the verge of ritual. “Never giving up is how the winners sort themselves out from the wigglers. You might have to sort through thousands of every version of every asshole you never wanted to see again, but that’s just the thing you need to level up. Enduring their uselessness and general unpleasantness will remind you how to be the 8est.”

“I see dying hasn’t changed your need to 8e 8est,” she says.

That she’s adopting the same fussyfangs, tight-lipped meddle-face Kanaya would adopt while in the Maybe This Will End On Its Own portion of your arguments incenses you more than you really understand, considering there would categorically be no attendant Vriska I Am Going To Be Supportive And Helpful And You Will Hate It.

(Apparently you’d hid the fact you secretly loved it too well? She never seemed to catch on and would add, in not so many words, that she would continue despite this, and that she had a pathological need to fix everyone which overpowered her better judgement, or, actually verbatim: So Help Me I Am Going To Shooshpap The Hell Out Of You You Silly Girl.)

The burst of disdain you feel could be because there was only ever room for one fussmaster in your life, or it could be a sense that this alternate version should had no traction with which to judge you. Seriously? Sure, she never killed any of her friends from spite, but was that really because Aranea has the moral high ground, or was it simply because she was a HUGE WEENIE???????? There’s no way you’re letting this sorry excuse for a Serket interpret your genuine and completely helpful advice as indicative of some sort of character flaw!

However, you know she knows that’s what you were feeling, because USELESS BLUEBLOOD PSYCHIC POWERS.

Actually, maybe the reason her empath skills seem so much more existent than her manipul8tion is because she’s a passive class. You probably should have thought of that before.

BLUH BLUH, WHAT WERE YOU EVEN HOPING TO ACHIEVE?

You’ve been wasting your time from the point you decided Burial Mound the Thousandth would suffice as a momentary distraction from eternity.

Proving without a doubt that this is the shittiest dancestor feelings jam ever, Aranea paps the hand you had kept hanging, unsure, by your waist, a moment of social anxiety you instantly regret because that’s it, you have officially jumped the cartilage-based murderfish, the paps keep coming and the older teen’s shooshes have the audacity to be Actual Things, and maybe it’s Light powers or just straight-up experience but you can tell this conversation has moved into a whole new geological layer of Hell before the words even come out of her stupid fussy face.

“Recently Alpha Terezi and I met. It’s odd how the people we might need to meet are kept away from us by fate.”

“Pyrope’s need of anything to do with me ended when she sta88bed me in the 8ack,” you say, though there’s a not-insubstantial feeling that it’s more along the lines of when you broke Tavros’ legs and killed Aradia. Stupid lousy wannabe-legislacerator best friends and their senses of morality and justice and their disinclination to bend the law for anyone, not even you.

The fact you even tried to make her choose says more about how you are, again, kind of an idiot!, because you witnessed more closely than anyone who wasn’t DEAD (well, at that point!) how seriously Terezi Pyrope took The Law, you ignored the 8reaks and thought you could cheat a game with the straightest, least malleable rules ever; you thought, really thought, for a useless hot serving of seconds she would choose you, the huge 8itch who couldn’t even be trusted to not mutilate and murder her friends.

“She told me she’d rather you weren’t dead, when all was said and done. Hardly bursting with enthusiasm but still on the positive side of things, no?”

There’s no escaping this conversation, short of hotfooting it. You could  try. You bend parts of the dreamscape to LOMAT for maximum foliage and secret passageways. The beach remains, but you can see the sky-compasses and it’s warmer, now, closer to a tropical climate. Aranea watches you, impassive, but you begin to suspect this Mindfang is a predator in her own way, calculating how best to incapacitate your sharp bits and rip through your squishy belly for the delicious viscera.

How long ago did she meet Alpha Terezi, anyway? On that note, her hunting you might have been exactly what happened, considering she never mentioned what reason she was mausoleum-spelunking.

Shit.

Might as well have your choice of which guts of yours will be spilled!

“Surefire Pyrope, regret something? Never thought I’d live to hear it. Ha—not that I did!! Told her someday she was going to do something she regretted and would want to take back and wouldn’t be able to, I fucking TOLD HER, but no, she regrets killing me, of course it turns out I needed to die for the perpetuation of existence!!! There went all that work I did to try and make up for things and be a hero! What was I thinking, anyway?! I was never gonna be a hero. Nothing was ever gonna make it up to them! Now I get to spend the rest of eternity loafing around doing fuck all, hoping someday in this sea of ghosts I’ll have the kind of connections we didn’t even have before becoming Dead Extras, but what would it even matter if we did? We’re dead. We’re D88D and nothing we ever do will ever matter again!!!!!!!!”

“You came back from the dead before. It’s not outside the realm of possibility it could happen again,” says the Sylph of Light, as if the concept of alive weren’t so academic there could be a department chair for it in her case. “There’s the Void at your back, here, but that doesn’t make it meaningless. You still have a life, after a fashion, and ways to grow.”

A parakeet screeches above the two of you. Apparently that’s one voice for hell no, unlikely much?, so you don’t bother saying it for yourself.

Aranea continues: “We all have our parts to ensure this millennia-wide enterprise of a new universe comes to fruition. Some will have more screentime, certainly. But to say that the alpha timeline didn’t need you living does not necessitate that the timeline does not need you, for a given value of you-as-an-enitity, considering the nature of the Game in general and our specific sessions’ abundance of Doomed Timelines. You’re worried death has made you stagnate? You stagnated while alive; that you’ve noticed at all signals that you’re coming along well, I would say! Don’t be discouraged. Though my cohort has done little since arriving in the dreambubbles, your friends have continued to work even in death! There has been Aradia, though she now lives, and Feferi, the Witch of Life, whose favour with the horrorterrors are the reason we have this space at all!”

“Knew Peixes could actually do something,” you mutter.

“Don’t be discouraged, and don’t feel as if I brought up your sister in scourge as a commentary. It’s not as if this is a contest between you two. Terezi and I talked through what it meant for her, but what did it mean to you, Vriska?”

 _What happened to boo hoo, I was an awful Sylph?_ you want to snarl.

You’ve no reason to tell this stranger—unknown, despite the similarities—things from the dusty, cobweb infested corners of your heart. What could she teach you, anyway? What did she ever do in her miserable short life, or, for that matter, her death? You’ve killed hundreds of trolls, lived and died and rose as a god only to die again, you’re a ghost, and you’ve looted mind-boggling amounts of boonbucks. You even went on a human date! No other troll could say as much.

All that said, you’re thirteen going on eternity. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to talk about best friends.

Besides, maybe she’ll find how you feel too morbid. It’ll serve her right for asking.

With concentration, you change the dreamscape to the platform of the Meteor. The two of you are still standing awkwardly close to each other (though Aranea had finally taken her fussy mitts off your shoulder) so you walk over to where your computer rests on top of Mindfang’s journal. You can see the slashed door to the Ultimate Reward far in the distance. Other than that, there’s not much to see.

“Fine. Don’t complain when you’ve decided this was a waste of time,” you say.

You point to about where Terezi stood, in her Redglare outfit she was too tall for, clutching her dinky, squeaky Pyralspite.

“She was there, and I was over here, pestering John. She pulled out her caegar and said there were two choices: stay or go. So I made it land on ‘go’, which I thought was stupid. Why even bother? She knew I’d go! Never thought she’d have the guts to kill me. Still not sure how that death was just, either! Gotta say though, a part of me was glad she Terezi did it. The fact the afterlife’s a 24-hour party aside, she finally cared again, enough to kill me, she finally rose to my bait.”

Now you’re the one blushing bright, flailing your arms around wildly, though yours is an excitement of agitation instead of a desire to tell people all they never needed to know.

Aranea has arranged herself on the floor next to your computer, Mindfang’s journal perched on her lap. You can tell she’s suppressing the urge to read it, constantly switching her gaze to its leatherbound, yellowing contents of pirating badassery, only to literally throw her head back up to stare at you.

"Look at me, blubbering like a goddamn waste of space. How sad is that, for me to be glad she killed me? But at least she8 notic8d m8 again!”

That didn’t take long. You felt like there was more to the story, but there isn’t. There’s not much left to say, and so you shrug when Aranea’s gaze turns quizzical; you flip your hair, for good measure. The floor-bound scorpio’s claws tap against the journal’s binding. She hmm’s.

“Wouldn’t you have lived, if you stayed?” she asks, eventually.

“I was going to fight Jack and save the day. I was going to make it up to her. To everyone! They were gonna see I’d changed my ways, that I was a hero!” you’re pacing, pounding feet loud but no louder than your carousing. “They would’ve shit their pants for joy when I brought back the demon’s bloody snout, but no, after all the work I put in to orchestrate myself as the creator, someone else will murder that stab-happy bastard. That is, if anyone manages! The pressure to not descend into brainless, crippling failure might prove too much for them. None of those assholes are even a god besides Aradia!”

“I’m merely asking if you entertained the thought of staying. Perhaps it hadn’t been the opportune moment? The alpha timeline didn’t resurrect you, after all.”

“Well, I didn’t stay!”

“Then there were only two options: that she kill or, or that you leave?” Aranea seems to process this for a few moments; soon, she nods, to herself, and picks herself up, journal clutched against her breast. She pushes her glasses back up her nose.

You kick at the floor, idly, staring at the cracks between the metal tiles.

“When I spoke with Terezi, she confessed that those were the only options visible to her, as well. She never expected you to stay. She would have let you go, if there hadn’t been misfortune to compel her, having arrived to that particular juncture of possibility,” says the Sylph, who grabs your hand and leads you across the Void.

It takes no time at all to reach the sGRUB logo. You’d thought it was so far, when you were alive. Aranea brought you directly underneath the glowing purple door. In your mind’s eye, you see it: Jack, fresh from slaughtering the planets and moons of the troll’s session. You, the Thief of Light, bounding towards the demon with your usual pixiedust trail. Past You smirks, Fluorite Octet in hand, and issues the challenge.

You wondered how Jack would respond. Would he kill you immediately? Would you fight?

You weren’t sure you’d win.

Well, fuck! Jack teleporting away hadn’t been one of the options you’d considered.

“She could have let you leave. In another timeline, she did.”

Jack returns in a flash of sparkling lime, accompanied by the corpses of Karkat and Terezi. He throws them at your feet. Alternate Past You’s face is a one wheeled device on a string balancing act of rage, disgust, and grief.

Though the prospect of your friends’ deaths alarms you, the shield of not-real lets you focus, momentarily, on how absolutely glorious you look in the Ancestral Awakening outfit, how Jack omnipotent-murderous-bastard himself wasn’t exactly wiping the floor; at first, he was on the defensive. You might just have won!

The mental picture show ends.

“While the Demon accepted your challenge, he first saw fit to follow your trail to the Meteor, to finish the job he started when entering your session. The remaining trolls were on the roof. He killed them all.”

Pacing isn’t enough to calm you down, now. You kick the slashed door repeatedly, growling, and yell in response to Aranea that you could have stopped the massacre. Aranea’s picture show had to have been from Terezi’s description, instead of some variety of Light power, and so the facts presented were based on probable choices made instead of indelible happenings.

You could have stopped him. No one would have died!

Your ankle aches from the impact against the door, but you keep kicking. Everything besides the thumps and the pain becomes a blur.

You don’t even remember if you feel angry about Terezi not giving you a chance; you think maybe, ultimately, you might be angry at yourself, for not having stolen the luck to get the jump on Jack (in this probable scenario that might not have happened even if you’d left.) The extent of your ignorance regarding Light stings a bit, too. You might have been able to steer away from the vertex entirely if you had ever communed with your aspect.

You’re so focused on the fickleness of the sun that you hardly notice when there’s a sudden lower altitude to everything, and a companion pain shooting up your spine to chaser the agony prom from what are probably fractures in your ankle (because you are a moron.) Apparently Aranea has more strength in that chubby frame than you would have expected. She threw you to the floor. You have to admit, the gears in your brain switch mighty fast after that. Now your rage focuses on her.

“The fuck, baby Mindfang,” you yell, followed by “Ow!” for good measure. You swear, if bluebloods weren’t beyond your psychic abilities, you’d have her saunter right on to the Noble Circle’s dinner table, stat.

“The fuck what, Vriska!” she yells back, almost as aggressive. You kick her from the ground. She pins the leg with her foot, and scowls down at you, hands on her hips. “Is this how you handled feelings jams before you died? No wonder everyone hated you!”

“They hated me because I was a murderer, because I backstabbed everyone in the end, because I was the worst friend in all of paradox space! They hated me because they could never trust me. I was the 8est, the absolute flipping 8est, and it means absolutely nothing. I’m stuck here, dead with all the chumps, no more important than you, some leftover ghost from another universe!”

The dice appear in your hand, and you roll them. A bombchain cuts through the air and bites at Aranea, knocks her off her foothold on you. It doesn’t hurt her, much. You sit up.

You wish you weren’t crying.

You wish Aranea didn’t look so sympathetic.

“You died because you need to grow up,” she says. ”You need to learn more about your destiny as a Hero of Light. There’s more to it than leveling up your stats. You need to understand. This entire game is a narrative. Why do you think it picks adolescents for the perpetuation of reality itself?”

“Must be more omniscient pedos where white text guy came from,” you sneer, pulling your knees up.

“Because,” she says, after a brief lapse to hang her head in her heads. “Adolescence is the crux between what others made of you and what you will make of yourself. You become your adult selves, and bring forth a new universe. On Alternia, you were as society made you; you killed to survive, but you also killed as your due. But these were your friends. Terezi regrets killing you. She doubts, now, doubts fiercely, because what sort of friend was she, to not find a way to save you? Even though your death is, obviously, a necessary condition for reality itself! That’s friendship.”

You press your face against your knees, curl your arms around tighter. You don’t want to talk about Terezi anymore.

Aranea kneels, scritches her claws, lightly, through your hair.

“It’s all part of the narrative.You have time, still, to grow. If there’s anything here in the Ring, it’s time. You’ll see her again someday. Just as I’ll eventually get to see Meenah. Even through centuries of waiting, it’s worth it, isn’t it?”

“She’ll forget about me. She’s alive. There’s that human, now, and crabby pants,” you say, weak.

“You’ll just have to remind her.”

She pets your hair for a few more minutes. Eventually, you rub the tears from your face, and uncurl; you tilt your head away from the other girl’s hand.

“How about we get on that lore exposition?” she asks, with a small smile. “I’m good for my debts, I promise.”

A tome the size of thirty tinkerbulls materializes in Aranea’s grasp. She has a glint in her eye, as if she’ll trap you there if you get frisky.

-

You don’t actually see that.

You are too busy being ON ANOTHER PLANET ENTIRELY and ALIVE and „WROOOOOOOONG… to see her do that.

There’s Gamzee, dancing his juggalo ass off, in the corner of your vision. Quickly you switch focus, back to how wrong you are, to screaming about being something that should not in any universe exist. That fucking hopped-up clown prototyped the world’s least capable of continuing to exist troll-mashup with your corpse and the brownblood’s.

You stutteringly wonder what he’s done with the bodies besides stuff them in a refriger8tor…„freeze box…refriger8tor!!!!!!!!

Yeah.

That’s it.

Your name is TAVRISPRITE.

You are going to EXPLODE.


End file.
